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Study: Teen Pot Smoking Won't Lead to Other Drugs as Adults

Personally,
I'm not yet ready to discard the idea that marijuana is a "gateway"
drug for teens - a drug that may lead teens to use "harder" drugs. But,
here's a new study which concludes that marijuana is not a "gateway"
drug for teens.

New research finds little support for the
hypothesis that marijuana is a "gateway" drug leading to the use of
harder drugs in adulthood.

Teens in the study who smoked
marijuana were more likely to go on to use harder illicit drugs, but
the gateway effect was lessened by the age of 21, investigators say.

Harder
drugs in the study referred to illicit drugs that include analgesics,
cocaine, hallucinogens, heroin, inhalants, sedatives, stimulants, and
tranquilizers.

The study is published in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Failure
to graduate from high school or find a job were all bigger predictors
of drug use in young adulthood than marijuana use during adolescence,
says study researcher Karen Van Gundy, who is a sociologist at the
University of New Hampshire.

Van Gundy says she did not set out
to disprove the idea that marijuana is a gateway drug when she and
co-researcher Cesar J. Rebellon examined survey data from 1,300 mostly
male Hispanic, white, and African-American young adults who attended
south Florida public schools in the 1990s. The participants were
followed from enrollment in the sixth or seventh grade until they
reached their late teens or early 20s.

"Most of the previous
research has examined early drug use among people with serious drug
problems," she says. "These people do tend to progress from alcohol and
marijuana use to other drugs."

When the teens in the study were followed forward into young adulthood, however, a different picture emerged.

"We
were somewhat surprised to find the gateway effect wasn't that strong
during the transition to adulthood," Van Gundy says. "It really didn't
matter if someone used marijuana or not as a teen."

Specifically,
the study found illicit drug abuse in young adulthood to be much more
closely linked to stress during the teen years and whether or not the
young adults were employed.

But Columbia University sociologist
Denise B. Kandel, PhD, whose research early in the decade found
marijuana to be a gateway drug, calls the new research highly flawed
and the conclusions "ill founded."